Pollan explores four desires: sweetness, beauty, intoxication,
and control.
by delving into botany and the history of people manipulating plants
- or is it a history of plants manipulating people?

You will find his concept of the way plants have influenced
history very intriguing. From his gardening background and his lifelong
interest in the soil and plants in particular he tells a unique story
of connectedness. He explores the social history of four plants and
the natural history of four human desires which they stir and gratify.

Here is but one intriguing paragraph by
Pollen: "No one has yet written the natural history of world religion,
but we have some idea of the story such a book would tell. Among other
things, it would force us to rethink the relation of matter and spirit
- specifically, plant matter and human spirituality. For it would tell
of how a select group of psychoactive plants and fungi (among them the
peyote cactus, the Amanita muscaria and psilocybin mushrooms, the
egot fungus, the fermented grape, ayahuasca, and cannabis) were present
at the creation of several of the world's religions. One of the world's
earliest known religions was the cult of Soma, practiced by the ancient
Indo-Europeans of central Asia; according to its sacred text, the Rig
Veda, Soma was an intoxicant with the powers of a god. People worshiped
the drug itself - which ethnobotanists now think was Amanita muscaria,
the mushroom sometimes called fly agaric - as a path to divine knowledge."

You can guess by the book cover that one
plant is the apple. It is for the desire for sweetness - quite a universal
desire. His choice for the desire of beauty is the tulip. Both plants
have been moved around the world during human migrations as have countless
plants for centuries.

Read about the human desire for intoxication and the
human desire for control with some unlikely plants. Pollan's compelling
accounts of evolutionary development and the relationship to cultural
and physical science might inspire you to read such classics as Dawkin'sThe
Selfish Gene or Pinker's How the Mind Works. You may disagree with
Pollon but you will surely have a different thought when you look upon
your garden, whether it is a pot of herbs in your kitchen or the dandelion
in the lawn. Your library should have a copy.